Lodestone data web service access

I would like to have access to the data that is available on The Lodestone for character profiles. Being a developer, I want to be able to pull stats from my char for stuff I have in mind. I've been parsing HTML data from the page and it works ok... but whenever you change something in the page, I have to rewrite my parser. An API or WebService you could use would be nice to have for people like myself that want to create additional tools to help our gaming experience.

Likewise. Its getting annoying. At the very least, a bare bones XML version, but an API would be even better. I would love to simply call the info from a PHP page, do with it what I will, and toss it up on my LS's site as I see fit. I'm hoping this is one of the things they are holding back for when the forums come out of beta.

How is it that you are parsing the lodestone data, and how long have you been successfully doing it? I had written my own signature grabber a while back in php. It parsed the lodestone every half hour to update my signature with my character's data. Now, after a couple months, it appears I have been blocked. All I get when I try is "The server is experiencing unusually heavy traffic. Please try again later. " I discovered this today. When I loaded the page on a different webserver, it grabbed the data just fine. Trying to figure out what caused me to be blocked. Half an hour too frequent to look up one page? I had read some forums online of others having this same issue.

How are all these signature generator websites able to constantly update tons of player's signatures without being blocked?

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Originally Posted by drumz

How are all these signature generator websites able to constantly update tons of player's signatures without being blocked?

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Most sig servers I know of, update on a 24hour basis. 1/2 hour is too frequent and probably is what was the cause of your server being blocked.

The shortest updating server that I know of, that remains up and running, is 3 hour minimum, and doesnt even update automatically...it must be user triggered. Of course a sig server wouldnt be very good if it did that...but Im just saying.... timing is considered a big issue...so...

I would love to have a restful api to access lodestone data, Our friends at square could just give is a simple api to access basic data instead of having all this bandwidth wasted on screen scrapers / parsers. I would prefer JSONP for cross domain ajax loading.

WSDL for me.